Decorative art is exalted in painting and sculpture

'Tis the season to be jolly, and what could be jollier than a big, rugged male begging you on bended knee?

Bill Brewer's "Man" (acrylic on board, 50 inches high by 38 inches wide) is part of a group show at the Ballard/Fetherston Gallery that focuses on various new meanings of the old art pejorative, decorative.

The old meaning of decorative is clear to everyone. It covers not only hair ribbons and table flowers but flourishes carved into wooden furniture, peacocks in full display and paintings that are too pretty for their own good. In art, decorative used to be insult.

What's scorned by one generation is embraced by the next. Post-modernists see no reason to look down on lightening and brightening touches. Somebody looking for a painting that matches the sofa used to be the ultimate boob. Now there are doctoral dissertations being written on the social imperatives of superficiality.

Blame it on Andy Warhol, the bossa nova or the reemergence of Oscar Wilde, but today, there is no such thing as art that's too pretty for its own good.

Back to Brewer's "Man." With his broad chest, jutting jaw and big hands and feet, he's beefcake with a 1950s, French cafe twist. Think of a bruiser, but one who knows how to drink out of tiny cups without spilling.

With its baked mud and dried blood colors, the painting is not devoid of formal values. Notice how the man's feet rest flat against the back wall, which rises to become the foreground. Space wants to contract, and only a big, strong man can keep it open.

Brewer's "Man" is shaped like a skyscraper. Gary Komarin takes the same shape and makes it feminine. "Stacked Cakes" (tempera and mixed media on paper, 53 inches high by 24 inches wide) is a squishy soft pyramid of pastries, painted in a shaking hand.

The prospect of pastries makes many shake, which is probably why it's something of a preoccupation for the new decorative.

Larry Bemm creates abstract worlds devoted to the idea of cake. "American Midwest Hotdish" (oil on canvas, 40 inches high by 55 inches wide) has a luscious lemon sky with blueberry ridges. The ground is a lighter blueberry cream that promises a soft landing for wild cherries falling through space.

In spite of its title, Geoff Garza's "Pan Ducle" (mixed media, 36 inches high by 32 inches wide) does not evoke desserts. Painted to look sun faded and water stained, his softly colored pattern of squares is a bare, ruined choir, where late the sweet birds sang.

Garza knows that ruin can be decorative, and so does Peter Roux. In his "New World No. 3" (mixed media with waxy emulsions, 8 inches high by 18 inches wide), a large tree casts a purple-black shadow onto brown pond scum.

C. Blake Haygood grew up playing around abandoned farm machinery, and that has made all the difference. In his drypoint etchings, the equipment is missing or nearly so, reduced to a few rusty scratches in space. In "Woooo-Eeeee!" (28 inches high by 24 inches wide), a single decisive line ends in a bucket the size of a baby's thumb nail, radiating blue. Surrounded by scratches, it has the purity of a Communion wafer.

Kathy Moss investigates the aesthetic possibilities of feathers and fur balls. "No. 193" (oil on linen, 24 inches square) is a great cranberry outpouring on lime white ground. The edges of the cranberry form are feathered and full of energy, which the weight of mass is trying to press flat against the picture plane.

Beloved dolls age much faster than their owners. Melissa Stern's "Biggest Fan" is a ceramic version of a doll fondled down to its stuffing. New, it wouldn't have had any of this battered charm, the beauty of use.

It's hard to imagine a use for Elizabeth Jameson's wool clothing, woven for a Tinkerbell whose arms and legs had mutated into seaweed. The lovely precision of these small textiles, their clarity, heft and confidence, suggests the fault is ours. Of course they have uses. These arms and legs aren't odd until we are rude enough to say so.